Fight Club according to Freud

Sigmund Freud is the founder of modern psychiatry, and developed the psychoanalytic method: the examination of the mind using dream analysis. Freud’s ideas of identity and self are used in his concepts of the ego, super-ego and the id. The id is the set of instinctual trends; the ego is the organized, realistic part; and the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role. Through the film Fight Club by David Fincher, we are shown the alienation and struggle for the search of self and the dependence on material objects, for that sense of self. The film’s narrator is not a whole person; he is merely the representation of a person’s ego that, for the duration of the film, lets go of the reigns of control attached to his id.

Freud stressed that human behavior is a result of “intrapsychic forces in conflict” and that in order to analyze these forces he had to find ways of tapping into the unconscious of his patients. He believed that there are three elements of personality: the id, the ego, and the super-ego. The id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. This aspect of personality is completely unconscious and includes instinctive behavior, and is the primary component of your personality. The id strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants and needs. The ego on the other hand, is a component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality. Freud Believed that the ego develops from the id and makes sure that the impulses of the id can be expressed in a way that is acceptable in the real world. The last component of personality is the superego. The superego holds internalized moral standards and ideals and ideas of right and wrong that we acquire from our society. It is important to note, that it is not a separation of the mind into three structures and functions, they separate aspects and elements of the single structure of the mind.

In Fight Club, the unnamed narrator talks the audience through his personal